Shredded Towns
by Lexie-Rae
Summary: A twist on the ending of Paper Towns, because I couldn't get this idea out of my head. Slight swearing.


_This is something I couldn't stop thinking about after reading Paper Towns. It's a little twist on what could have happened and was written for the most part as a stream of consciousness, so I hope it's okay._

* * *

_Q._

I'm maintaining the perfect seventy-four mile per hour speed limit laid down by Radar when I see them. The cows on the freeway. They're not cows though, they're the land version of a whale. They're Moby Dick, back to haunt me from finals.

There's nowhere for me to go, even in a little sports car with a sharp turning circle we'd be beefburgers but in the minivan we stand no chance. All I can think of is dying. My hands fly from the wheel and they hang in the air, suspended uselessly like my brain. I can't think to do anything. We're all going to die.

Ben reaches over and grabs the wheel but I've already made some Radar-like calculations in my mind. We're not going to beat the cows.

I think briefly of my parents and then of her, of course.

And she is my last thought; Margo Roth Speigelman.

…

_Lacey._

Everyone tries to persuade me back to Florida, of course. And I should listen to them, rather than continuing this stupid suicide mission to find Margo. That's what it became, literally suicide.

I'm the sole survivor of that damn freak accident on the freeway. Ben, Q, Radar, they_ died_. Like one moment they were three normal - or not so normal - boys. Sweet. Dorky. Kind. Brilliant, if you look at them in the right light, boys. And then they were gone.

They ran away from graduation, like I did, with only fleeting excuses to their parents and now they'll never go home again. How are their parents supposed to get over that? I met them all; the boys' parents, at the hospital in just one Act of_ The Worst Day of my Life_. My life isn't over yet, amazingly, and yet I can already claim to have lived that; _The Worst Day of my Life_.

Ben's Mom kept sobbing one word over and over as she clutched onto my uninjured hand; _cows_, as though she couldn't understand how something as nonthreatening could cause such an unthinkable tragedy. Of course it wasn't cows that killed her son, not really, it was Margo.

And irrespective of everything else that's happened, and what everyone is telling me to do, I have one thing I need to do. Find Margo.

If not for me - because by now I've lost interest in the Q's quest to find her - then for the three boys who had so much more to live more than she or I. She needs to know what happened, she needs to know what she caused. She needs to feel the same ache in her heart that I'm feeling, or I need her to feel it. Selfishly, maybe.

So I've hitched a ride with a perfect stranger named Kevin and I'm on my way to Q's Paper Town. Kevin is unlike Ben, Q and Radar in just about every way possible; built like a stone pillar without a lick of enthusiasm in his thick set body. The radio takes the place of conversation and Kevin focuses on the road, murmuring occasionally about the impossibility of my destination of Algoe.

I ignore him.

I pretend to stare out of the window but all I can see are flashes of everything that's happened since Margo's been gone. I think of sharing a bathtub with Quentin and the way he really didn't give a shit about what anyone thought of him, well, aside from Margo. In time, I hope I can become a little more like Q in that respect. I hope that I can fall so unashamedly in love with someone that I'd prefer to be called crazy and possibly alienate all two of my friends than give up on that one person who has my heart. You'd think that I'd have learnt from this shitfest; loving Margo ultimately led to Quentin smashing his skull into a windscreen so hard that he'd never open his eyes again. There's nothing romantic about that. I should know, after staggering out of the mangled wreck of metal I watched as the spiderweb of crimson blood spread through the shattered glass until I was sure that there wasn't a drop left in his body. There sure wasn't any left in his cold white hand, the only part of him I could reach to touch.

My eyes are burning with hot tears at the memory. I let the teardrops glide down my cheeks and mist my vision, over-thinking _The Worst Day of my Life_ again. If I hadn't held onto Q's hand could I have saved Ben? Or Radar? It's just that I stumbled across Quentin first and once you've seen that you can't unsee it. And even though someone's hand is dead and heavy and cold in your own you can't let it go. You can't. Trust me. I squeezed and sobbed and tried in vain to wake him with gentle whispers because I didn't dare move him. It wasn't until I was pulled away to let the firemen do their work that I let myself really think about Ben and Radar.

Naively I'd expected that they'd crawl out moaning and whining in the endearing kind of way they had. But of course they didn't. They didn't say another word. Never again would I hear a ridiculous argument about t-shirts from garages or have someone call me _honeybunny_ in about the most offensive way possible whilst simultaneously making my heart laugh.

I miss them more than I've ever missed anyone in the world. And I'm more surprised than anyone. It's worse than losing Margo overnight and Becca to a stab in the back. Of course it is, because this is a _real_ tragedy.

The radio cuts and it takes me half a minute to realise that Kevin is actually speaking to me. I scrub my eyes furiously and smooth out the map I have as our sole reference. I vow that this will be the last time that I put Margo before Ben, Radar and Q. Before anyone.

After a lot of arguing with Kevin we finally, finally, finally happen across chez Margo. By the time we find it I'm furious with fatigue and raging with anger. I spit foul words at Kevin needlessly and he calls me something three hundred times more offensive than honeybunny but I don't care. Mercifully it seems that Kevin has a heart at least because he takes me to my destination before thundering away, but I don't care, I've found her.

The place is some kind of old barn that I enter through an actual hole in the wall rather than the door. The first thing I see in the sunstreamed barn is a claw-footed bath. An actual bathtub; Q in the form of a burning memory. I step forward cautiously, trying to be brave, for the sake of the guys. I almost feel like I can't do this and then I see her, hunched over a desk and writing.

All at once my strength is regained, in the form of anger, I think. She looks different, in a way that says 'look at me' or something. My biased eyes are not a good judge of character now.

"Margo." My voice is raw, broken by the day. I call out to her only once but it's enough. She stands and I regard her dishevelled form carefully as she stares to me blankly. It seems like she's looking beyond me, no doubt for Q, but of course he's not there.

"Oh." She almost sighs and then says "Give me like five minutes."

She's about to go back to her writing but I don't let her.

"Margo!" My voice screeches this time but she doesn't flinch at all.

"I almost let myself expect this from Q, you know? But I never thought_ you'd_ come, unless you've got some more clothes you're too skinny for." Margo says in a voice that doesn't seem all together hers.

I clench my jaw and feel my unbroken hand clench at my side, "You selfish, selfish bitch! Is that what this was all for? For Q to come and find you before you killed yourself? Did you want us all to panic like hell just so that you could be found and feel needed?"

"No. I didn't want to be found." Margo says simply, "I left so that everyone gets to be themselves and I get to be me."

Throwing my arms out I scream a little, "No one got to be themselves, except for you maybe. We were too busy worrying about you!"

"We?" Margo notes the pronoun and inclines her head a little, her ridiculous bangs falling with the movement.

I fall against the grubby wall and slide down it, my face in my hands and the tears flowing quickly. Margo seems not to know what to do, most likely because suddenly this little charade is no longer about her. "Q worked it all out. All of those crazy cryptic clues me and Becca would never had had the chance of understanding. He linked them all up, he obsessed about it. All for you, Margo."

She's looking at her filthy fingernails but I know she's listening, hard.

"And he knew you'd be here so we drove here like wildfire; me, Q, Ben and Radar." I further explain.

Margo scoffs a little, "You were in the same car as them? Really, Lace?"

"We crashed." I utter in a much softer voice than I'd wanted to use. "On the freeway. Crashed when we were still travelling at wildfire speed."

Her eyes linger over the cast on my arm and the cut by my eye.

I swipe my fingers beneath my eyes and then force myself up from the floor, "I only came here to tell you that. To tell you the lengths Q and his friends went to just for you. They sped away from Graduation and worked out the perfect seventy-four miles per hour limit to reach you in time. But they crashed on the freeway, they died for you, Margo."

She doesn't say anything and I'm glad, I can't think of how I'd care to comfort her.

"I need the keys to your car to get home for the funerals." I say in a defeated, raspy tone.

Margo stays rooted to the spot until I grab the keys from the mess of her den and drag her outside with me, leaving behind everything she brought to Agloe with her.

…

_Margo._

I sit at my window all dressed in black, looking into Q's room. Then, like all good rebels, I climb across just as I did the night I left for Agloe. Everyone's at the churchyard, saying goodbye. I couldn't bear to go.

I crawl onto his bed and lie amongst the four walls of his life, noticing that the only opening in the four walls is the window that opens into mine.

And I know that means something, because the signs always mean something.

* * *

_I have to confess that this was far from one of my favourite reads. By the end my main thought was of how much I disliked the character of Margo, for all she put everyone through. I kept thinking what if they had hit the cows? What if Margo's actions had, directly or indirectly, caused the deaths of Q and his friends? But as a Lacey fan and a little of a Margo hater, I didn't actually find much redemption here. Whoops. Maybe someone else could write it better? Hint, hint, only I'd love to read that. Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts._

_Lexie_


End file.
